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Calida
Calida, Latin for warmth, is an exoplanet orbiting the star Solis. At an average distance of about 145.5 million kilometers, it would seem too cold for life to form in liquid water with it being at least 4 million km from the edge of the Goldilocks Zone at any time. But due to a fortunately high amount of heavy metals, lanthanides, and actinides that helped form it, it has a core bursting with magnetic and thermal energy, significantly raising its temperature well into the Goldilocks Zone. 'Calida' Mass: '' ''Surface Area: 382013836.1079161 km^2 Aphelion: 141 935 741.578 km Perihelion: 148 195 258.372 km Eccentricity: 0.02010563 Orbital Period: days Rotational Period: 30.1 hours Inclination: 27.176° Precession cycle: ''21,500 years ''Satellites: 5 Surface pressure: 28.934 psi(sea level) Minimum temperature: -41 C° Median temperature: 20 C° Maximum temperature: 63 C° Calida is the third planet from its sun, with Calx, Millus, and Gahenna as you move in. Gahenna's best description is to combine Mercury with Mars and crank up the heat beyond Venus. Tidally locked to Solis in an orbit 17 days long, it's not surprising to find out that Gahenna's thin band of twilight is hot enough to melt most metals. A sea of magma has even formed on the extreme sun side and is meta-stable, maintaining at least half its full size at any time. Millus orbits every 103 days with the fastest rotation of the planets at 4.3 hours. Other than its rotation, Millus is the most boring planet in the system; it's essentially a ball of rock and metal with an atmosphere thinner than Mercury's. Calx is rather eccentric, the differences between its aphelion and perihelion at about 30 million km. It might have been a habitable planet had it not gotten knocked close enough to the sun to boil water during its orbital summer. Not exactly friendly to organisms made of water. Beyond Calida is Aiolos, jovians Nubes, Geminus, and Chronis, with Khione bringing up the very rear. Aiolos marks the boundary between terran and jovian with a mass of 15 earths and an atmosphere worth half an earth. Nubes is a typical jupiter, but more massive with a larger volume and greater density from its cold orbit. Khoine is an ice planet made almost entirely out of water, methane, and CO2 ices with some other hyperchilled aqueos solutions. At first glance it just looks like the biggest ice cube ever, but it's massive enough to pull itself into a spheroid and clear its orbit, so it's a planet. Pluto has been avenged! As for Geminus, it is quite... let's just say-''special''. Geminus was once two planets, named Gemina and Gemino. Gemina orginally formed at about 1 Jupiter mass, while Gemino was closer to that of Saturn. Each formed in their own seperate orbits about 60 million km apart with Gemino further out. Just barely stable enough to maintain their orbits, but The Great Disturbance simultaneously sent a flurry of asteroids into the system and messed with the inside of the system itself, effectively altering their orbits until they overlapped-twice. No amount of resonance could stop the inevitable after that. Gas and dust flew everywhere when the two planets connected. It might have been the end of Gemino, but gravity and inertia had other plans. Gemino's core got caught in Gemina's gravitational pull, but was moving with enough inertia to just simply swing back around and repeat. The two cores began orbiting each other like binary planets and their magnetic fields aligned. The gas swelled with them to form a semi-lobed sphere. With two cores orbiting each other every 15.6 hours, possibly the strangest planet in the galaxy was born. Chronis is a large, light-green gas giant, so named for its peculiar rotation, revolution, and satellites. It rotates every 10 hours, its year is 100 earth years, and it has 3 moons that orbit in a 1:2:4 resonance. Even its orbit is almost a perfect circle. How Chronis got this way lies in the many factors created by The Great Disturbance. But enough about Calida's neighbors. Let's focus in on Calida itself. Calida's History Calida first formed 5.6 Gya like nearly any rocky body, but with some interesting materials. The system itself formed from a cloud of more evenly dispersed elements with a larger amount of heavy metals. These elements were just barely spaced out enough to prevent condensing, but then a nearby star just had to blow up and condense it with a supernova and add to its heavy metal count. When fusion started and Solis was born, a large amount of proto-planets had already formed due to the high density in the gas disk. Solis feasted on the dust cloud and grew, spinning faster and faster. The heaviest elements gathered at its equator and were ejected, encouraging planetary formation even further. The planets were mostly established only a few million years later. Calida was smaller, only 80% its current size. But that was soon to be remedied. The Great Disturbance-5.49 Gya to 5.44 Gya The Great Disturbance occured when a hyperbole star passed by the system. It caused a great deal of havoc on the young Solis System. A F0 star, it was so big and close it looked like a moon from Calida. It pulled on the entire system in passing and changed the fate of every planet in doing so. It altered the orbits of every planet directly and/or indirectly and flung in bodies from the edges of Solis' reach. Millus was hit and its rotation sped up to its current state, Calx was pushed and pulled into a weird orbit, Geminus was born-I could go on. But perhaps the most affected out of all of them was Calida. The Morris and Circum Collisions-5.46 Gya to 5.45 Gya A small planetesimal almost the size of the moon struck a glancing blow at Calida, completely destroyed in the process. The ejecta collected into a moon, Morris, about 13,000 km away from Calida. Morris would later be responsible for most of Calida's tides so life was encouraged to go on land, but there was a more pressing problem on hand. The collision caused the planet's rotation to come to almost a complete standstill, like Venus in our solar system. Calida would have been tidally locked to Morris, giving it a 26-day long rotation had it not been hit again-this time by a body the size of Ceres. It picked up rotational speed from this impact, giving it a 30.1 hour long day-something photosynthetic life could handle easily. And what became of this small body? Half of it was ground into Calida, while the other half spun wildly away into an orbit about 50,000 km away. I quite literally mean spun away-this thing was rotating every hour or so on an axis less stable than Nix's. Nearly liquefied, the denser portions of it gathered on the Calida side, but don't think it's about to tidally lock. Like I said, this thing was a bucking bronco! So what was the path of least resistance? Make the axis align with the denser parts-which is exactly what happened. With one side facing its planet at all times and still rotating every 2.4 hours, Circum became the oddest moon on record. Category:Astrobiology